Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go

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A man in a Donald J. Trump shirt awaited Mr. Trump himself at a rally in Cincinnati this month. Ohio may be critical to his chances of winning the presidency.CreditCreditTy Wright for The New York Times

Donald J. Trump, confronting a daunting electoral map and a significant financial disadvantage, is preparing to fall back from an expansive national campaign and concentrate the bulk of his time and money on just three or four states that his campaign believes he must sweep in order to win the presidency.

Even as Mr. Trump has ticked up in national polls in recent weeks, senior Republicans say his path to the 270 Electoral College votes needed for election has remained narrow — and may have grown even more precarious. It now looks exceedingly difficult for him to assemble even the barest Electoral College majority without beating Hillary Clinton in a trifecta of the biggest swing states: Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

With a divisive campaign message that has alienated many women and Hispanics, Mr. Trump appears to have pushed several traditional swing states out of his own reach. According to strategists on both sides of the race, polling indicates that Mrs. Clinton has a solid upper hand in Colorado and Virginia, the home state of Senator Tim Kaine, her running mate. Both states voted twice for George W. Bush, who assiduously courted Hispanic voters and suburban moderates.

In addition, Trump allies have grown concerned about North Carolina, a Republican-leaning state that has large communities of black voters and college-educated whites — two audiences with which Mr. Trump is deeply unpopular.

While Mr. Trump is not ready to give up entirely on any of the major battlegrounds, advisers have become increasingly convinced that his most plausible route to the presidency, and perhaps his only realistic victory scenario, involves capturing all three of the biggest contested electoral prizes on the map, and keeping North Carolina in the Republican column.

Mr. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, are expected to campaign intensively across those four must-win states, with Mr. Trump trumpeting a set of blunt slogans through mass media and Mr. Pence focused on shoring up support from conservatives and right-of-center whites.

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The crowd at a campaign rally that brought Donald J. Trump and his running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, to Winston-Salem, N.C., last week.CreditTodd Heisler/The New York Times

There is no imminent plan, Trump advisers say, to match Mrs. Clinton’s spending on television ads. Instead, they intend to aim Mr. Trump like a battering ram at a small number of targets, to keep delivering his provocative message on trade, terrorism and immigration.

The primary “super PAC” backing Mr. Trump, Rebuilding America Now, is taking an identical approach: It has reserved airtime only in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania. The main outside group supporting Mrs. Clinton, Priorities USA Action, is advertising in those three states and half a dozen more.

John Brabender, a Republican strategist who has worked extensively in Pennsylvania and the Midwest, said Mr. Trump had a real but tenuous path to victory, involving a smaller map of swing states than typical for a presidential nominee. Mr. Brabender said Mr. Trump would certainly have to seize Pennsylvania, which has not voted Republican since 1988.

“Does Trump have to run the table of the top three targets? Absolutely,” Mr. Brabender said. “The fact that we have to worry about winning Pennsylvania to win the presidency tells you it’s a difficult task.”

Mr. Trump’s inability to broaden the Republican electoral map has heartened supporters of Mrs. Clinton, even as Democrats in general have been dismayed by Mr. Trump’s tenacity in national polls. In the aftermath of this month’s Republican convention, Mr. Trump appeared to enjoy a modest bounce, pulling even or slightly ahead of Mrs. Clinton in several national surveys conducted before the Democratic convention.

Gov. Terry McAuliffe of Virginia, a longtime political ally of the Clintons, said that Mrs. Clinton could effectively throttle the Trump campaign by winning Virginia, where he is confident of her standing, and one other swing state. He named Florida as the most inviting option.

“If you put a combination together of Florida and Virginia, it’s virtually impossible for Republicans to win the presidency,” Mr. McAuliffe said. “Electoral College-wise, we are in a very strong position today.”

Each of the key states presents a mix of larger cities and less populated agricultural and former industrial areas, where Mr. Trump has most often gained traction. Mr. Trump’s message of clawing back lost jobs has resonated most in distressed manufacturing regions.

But with the exception of Pennsylvania, where joblessness is slightly higher, the unemployment rate in each swing state hovers near the national average of 4.9 percent or lower.

Democrats caution that they view Mr. Trump as a wild-card candidate with unpredictable pockets of support, potentially capable of warping the political landscape even late in the election season.

For now, though, Mr. Trump is grappling with a magnified version of the dilemma that threatens to stymie Republicans every four years. Democrats have won a consistent set of 18 states in every presidential election since 1992, giving them a base of 242 Electoral College votes even before counting some of the biggest swing states. As a result, the last two Republican nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, would have needed to capture nearly all the contested states on the map in order to win.

At an earlier point in the campaign, Mr. Trump had hoped to leverage his support from working-class whites and independent voters to put some overwhelmingly Democratic states in play, including New York and Massachusetts.

Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman, said this month that Mr. Trump intended to compete in strongly Democratic states like New Jersey and Oregon. In an email on Thursday, Mr. Manafort said the political landscape offered Mr. Trump numerous paths to victory.

“We have many different ways, much more than Romney had,” Mr. Manafort said.

In private, Trump advisers say the campaign now takes a colder and more clinical view of the electoral map. Mr. Trump, Republicans believe, may have even fewer ways to count to 270 than Mr. Romney and Mr. McCain had, because of his debilitating unpopularity with women and nonwhite voters.

Mr. Trump continues to fight at a severe financial and organizational disadvantage against Mrs. Clinton, leaving him without the funds to campaign effectively across all of the states Mr. Romney contested. At the end of June, Mr. Trump had less than half as much cash in reserve as Mrs. Clinton — $20 million to her $44 million.

In several major swing states, Mr. Trump’s campaign has not yet approved final budgets for his state-level operations, according to Republicans in communication with his campaign, leaving Republicans on the state and national levels uncertain about his ability to mount major advertising and get-out-the-vote operations.

And in some of the most crucial states, Mr. Trump continues to face resistance within his own party: In Ohio, he has feuded openly with the popular Republican governor, John Kasich, a former primary opponent who has refused to endorse his campaign. In Florida, some of the most influential Hispanic Republicans in the southern part of the state have withheld their support, hobbling his candidacy there.

The map is not entirely forbidding for Mr. Trump: Both Republicans and Democrats see him as holding an edge in Iowa, a heavily white state with six electoral votes that President Obama won twice. And some top Trump aides remain hopeful that the larger terrain of the election will shift in his direction.

Trump advisers have argued to national Republicans that they are well positioned to compete in Michigan, a Rust Belt state that no Republican presidential candidate has won since 1988. Should Mr. Trump overtake Mrs. Clinton there, it would allow him a bit more room for error in one of the other cornerstone states.

Strategists for Mrs. Clinton largely dismiss that possibility, pointing out that Mr. McCain and Mr. Romney also hoped to compete in both Michigan and Wisconsin, only to see the states slip away well before Election Day.

Joel Benenson, the chief strategist for Mrs. Clinton’s campaign, said Mr. Trump had not yet made inroads in any nontraditional swing states. “There isn’t any state that they’re making us play defense in, that we wouldn’t already compete vigorously in anyway,” Mr. Benenson said.

Still, Mr. Pence campaigned on Thursday in the Detroit suburbs, in what amounted to an early prospecting expedition for the Trump campaign into Democratic territory. The Indiana governor intends to spend most of his time in the Rust Belt, including Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Mr. Pence, who is popular on the right, is also expected to play defense for Mr. Trump in a few conservative states, like Georgia and Arizona, where Mrs. Clinton may be competitive. A former radio host, Mr. Pence will be a ubiquitous presence on conservative talk shows, to ensure that the Republican base stays loyal to its unorthodox nominee.

Robin Hayes, the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party, said he anticipated that Mr. Pence, an evangelical Christian, would visit the state often to speak about “North Carolina Judeo-Christian values.” Mr. Hayes, a former member of Congress and a friend of Mr. Pence’s, said it was essential for Mr. Trump to defend Republicans’ grip on North Carolina in order to win nationally.

“There’s no substitute for winning, and it is a critically important state,” Mr. Hayes said. “It’s going to be an absolute, bruising kind of campaign.”